Benjamin Franklin once wrote that “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes”. In the world of IT, I would say there is another certain thing: issues or the so called incidents. The key to coping with incidents, is to offer a seamless way for end-users to file tickets and track the progress of their inquiries. By leveraging the UI extensibility of vCD we can integrate ServiceNow (or any other ITSM) into the portal itself and make it native to the overall user experience.

In this blog post, we will look into how by exposing incident management directly in the vCloud Director (vCD) UI, users will be able to:

Create new incidents

View their current list of incidents

View the comments related to an incident

Post new comments

Close incidents

These changes will be reflected in the native interfaces of the incident system, in our case, ServiceNow, where the service provider can further manage them.

Solution Architecture

The solution architecture is relatively simple.

On the high-level, it consists of:

vCD platform

UI and API extensions

Message Queue

vRO to handle the requests

ServiceNow, which is our target system.

Solution

Let’s see how we can achieve our goals through the vCD UI Extension.

Create new incident

Creating an incident is as simple as providing the description of the incident, but the form can be enhanced with a lot more data collected from the user.

View existing incidents

To present to the user only their incidents we will filter the incident table by the created_by field, and value the username of the currently logged in user in the vCD UI. For this to work both users needs to exists in vCD and in ServiceNow. This process can be automated using blocking tasks or vCD notifications, i.e when new users are being created in vCD, we can automatically create them in ServiceNow.

Service Provider updates the incident

Service Provider can log in to their ServiceNow instance and manage the incident from their by commenting and changing the status of the incident.

Incident updates

The user created the incident will see the comments and the status of the incident.

Posting comments

Then the user can update the incident them self by posting a comment.

Closing incident

To finalize the flow, the user needs to close the incident by filling the following form.

Conclusion

This way, the end-user has a very simple and familiar way of requesting help from the service provider. On the other hand, the service provider can leverage a powerful and feature-rich ITSM backing system to manage their support requests. The backing system can be a heavily customized ServiceNow or any other solution on the market.